I don't use them anymore, but I'm curious about others opinions on this list...

The more time I spend in Python, discovering what "Pythonic" code is and such, it seems that I throw away much in terms of academic learnings as far as "OOP correctness" goes. In doing so, I find that, in general, overall LOC (yes, I'm aware that this is a poor metric to judge anything on), readability and overall quality of code seems to go up. Yes, you give the user much more rope to hang themselves with making the general assumption that the user knows what they're doing, but we're all consenting adults here after all, right? ;)

As an example, I initially had an OAuth 2.0 client library that was roughly 450 LOC (using ABCs, adapter patterns for the various flows, etc). Dropping this for a more "Pythonic" (at least, what my interpretation of Pythonic code is) brought the entire library down to 55 LOC. Having said that, the decline in LOC and overall grok-ability wasn't entirely due to moving away from ABCs and dropping the use of adapters, but it did have quite a bit to do with it).

As such, I see ABCs as somewhat of an anti-pattern in the Python world. The concept is obviously essential in non-duck-typed language using strict OOP, but does it *really* belong in Python?

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Demian Brecht
@demianbrecht
http://demianbrecht.github.com
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